Most email systems today treat messages as private to the person or the group of people that have access to the email “inbox”. Most of the time, this is an individual person and not a group of people. When an email is to be shared, it may be accomplished in a variety of ways.
The most common method to share email is to forward the email to be shared to other individuals. This action requires that the email client support the function to copy/duplicate the email message being shared into another email message and then uses the existing email infrastructure to “send’ the message to multiple recipients.
Another common methodology is to copy the contents of the email onto the “clipboard” and then paste the email contents into a document (e.g., a word processing document) that can then be placed into a shared repository (e.g., a file folder that is accessible by multiple individuals).
Another method of sharing an email is to copy the contents of the email onto a shared space such as a wiki (e.g., a collaborative website that allows multiple visitors to add, remove, and edit content included within the website).
Unfortunately, none of the above-described methods allow the email message to be shared as a contextual unit that includes attachments. Further, when forwarding copies of an email message to multiple people, subsequent edits made to the email message by a recipient are not shared with the group unless the edited copy is again provided to each person to which the original message was forwarded.